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P-values

I’m going to start this post with a confession: Up until a few days ago, the only thing I knew about p-values was that Randall Munroe didn’t seem to like them. My background is in geometry, not statistics, even though I occasionally try to fake it. But it turns out that a lot of other people don’t like p-values either, such as the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology which recently banned them. So I decided to do some reading (primarily Wikipedia) and it turns out, like most things in the world of data, there’s some very interesting geometry involved, at least if you know where to look.